Was it really that bad? The actual historic events were horrific, seeing as that at the time they knew so little about sharks. I didn't see the show but I thought that it might be difficult to dramatize the events. Is it worth watching?

If you can put yourself back in that period, you can imagine the horror. It might not be as scary in translation to current times.

I thought it was going to be more of a documentary. I've read one of the books about these events and a lot was made up.

Inventing the character Alex to tie all of the events together was really annoying to me. The taxidermist who killed it wasn't alone in the boat, he was with Murphy and they were out net fishing. Yes it was in a small boat and the shark got caught in the net, but there wan't another boat around to help.

The truth would have been a more dramatic ending. The shark lunged onto the boat (like Bruce in Jaws) and the guy beat it to death with a broken oar.

Originally Posted by GreenGuysMama

Was it really that bad? The actual historic events were horrific, seeing as that at the time they knew so little about sharks. I didn't see the show but I thought that it might be difficult to dramatize the events. Is it worth watching?

If you can put yourself back in that period, you can imagine the horror. It might not be as scary in translation to current times.

They were horrified, and yet not. The "experts" of the day insisted that it wasn't a shark, but a giant sea turtle, or a swordfish. Anything but a shark because sharks aren't aggressive. It was a more innocent time, so they didn't think it would happen again, or didn't want to think that. The authorities were concerned about lose of revenue during the peak tourist season (like in Jaws) so they installed shark nets and tried to downplay it. And remember there was just newspapers, no TV, so the news didn't travel too fast.

The number of attack victims was right, 2 men in the ocean, 1 man and 2 boys in the creek, with 1 surviving. The second man in the ocean was further up the coast and was not a lifeguard, but a bellhop in a different hotel than the Engleside. The writer of the book I read speculated that today, with prompt medical attention, the first man in the ocean and the man in the creek who went in to find the boy, probably would have survived.